Tuesday, March 03, 2015

Circuses
I dislike – the tedium of trapeze artists, too many brass instruments, the
creepy gaiety of clowns, tawdry performers in dirty costumes waiting to enter
the ring. As a boy with my grandfather (a Mason whose lodge, the Al Sirat
Grotto, sponsored the circus in Cleveland) I was simultaneously bored and
disgusted, a pairing of emotions that helped prepare me for a career in
journalism. I remember sitting in the bleachers near the backstage entrance and
watching a man in tights throw back his head and take a long pull from a
bottle. Ever since, I’ve tried to avoid scenes of enforced fun. As Dr. Johnson
observed: “Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.”

But
I like county fairs and carnivals. Sherwood Anderson called the former a “pagan
outbreak,” and I enjoy the livestock, crafts and cuisine. The freak shows of my
youth (“Alive, livin’ and breathin’!”)
have disappeared, replaced by tattooed crowds roaming the midway. Carnivals,
sort of low-rent county fairs, fill church parking lots with rides and games. Unlike
circuses, fairs and carnivals encourage mobility. Bored? Move along. How
exciting and disreputable a traveling carnival must have seemed to small town
Americans even a century ago. It would have been an annual, much-anticipated
event in that pre-Youtube era. Clive James in “The Carnival” (Angels Over Elsinore, 2008) understands
its arrival and departure as a life-metaphor:

“The
carnival, the carnival. You grieve,

Knowing
the day must come when it will leave.

But
that was why her silver slippers shone--

Because
the carnival would soon be gone.”

Dr.
Johnson nails a comparable thought, familiar to all grownups, in The Rambler #71: “The pleasure of
expecting enjoyment is often greater than that of obtaining it, and the
completion of almost every wish is found a disappointment.”

Monday, March 02, 2015

“. . . cemeteries
are for me like bookshops; I find it difficult to resist the temptation to
enter them and linger awhile.”

It was April or early May, and the snow was going or gone. A
low wall of fieldstones surrounded the cemetery in Schoharie County, N.Y. The epitaphs
on the earliest markers had been erased by time and acid rain, and some were
tilted by the freeze-buckled earth. The lambs carved on the stones of children
were worn headless. The grass, mostly red and white clover, hadn’t yet been
mowed and was thick with phlox. Birds sang and the air was fresh. Life felt
bountiful in the presence of so many dead.

“. . . I find it
strange that some hurry past cemeteries either without a second look or even
with a shudder. Meditation on the transience of life, intermittent rather than
continuous and rejuvenating rather than paralysing, is important for achieving
equanimity. And there is no better aid to such meditation, I find, than a good
graveyard.”

Like
Theodore Dalrymple in “And Death Shall Have His Dominion” (a good allusion to a lousy poem), I seek out
cemeteries; in particular, the remote, rural, often untended sort, though a sprawling
urban cemetery, vast enough to have neighborhoods and thoroughfares, offers
pleasures of another sort. Isaac Bashevis Singer reverses the cemetery-as-city
metaphor in the final lines of his story “Neighbors” (A Crown of Feather and Other Stories, 1973):

“From time
to time I looked out the window. The snow descended sparsely, peacefully, as if
in contemplation of its own falling. The short day neared its end. The desolate
park became a cemetery. The buildings on Central Park South towered like
headstones. The sun was setting on Riverside Drive, and the water of the
reservoir reflected a burning wick. The radiator near which I sat hissed and
hummed: `Dust, dust, dust.’ The singsong penetrated my bones together with the
warmth. It repeated a truth as old as the world, as profound as sleep.”

Dalrymple
visits Père-Lachaise, a cemetery at least as interesting as a good museum or bookshop.
He notes some of the celebrity graves – Balzac, Delacroix, Wilde – not to
mention Colette, Apollinaire and Borrah Minevitch --But reminds us: “.
. .most of the tombs in Père-Lachaise, as in every other cemetery,
are of people who led ordinary lives.” George Eliot honored such people,
people like you and me, in her goodbye to Dorothea Brooke, in the final
paragraph of Middlemarch:

“Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not
widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the
strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But
the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the
growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that
things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to
the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Sunday, March 01, 2015

Because
it’s one long tease, at least in the North, March is the longest month. A thaw would
arrive late in February and you could smell the earth, a rich mineral rot, for
the first time since October. If the thaw lasted into the following month, you
might start believing spring had arrived and comfort yourself with thoughts of imminent
sunshine and greenery. Then by mid-March a blizzard would hit, sometimes on St.
Patrick’s Day, and you’d be shoveling out the driveway within days of the
vernal equinox.In brief, March was a lesson in life, the end of apprenticeship,
time to think about sowing and
reaping, and preparing for next turn of the seasons. Basil Bunting grudgingly
praised Stevie Smith’s poems as “little stuff, but honestly done, worked on.” He
got it two-thirds right. “Little” is patronizing and wrong. Smith refused overweening
significance, self-important philosophizing. She was no Robert Lowell and never
pretended to be. Hers was the seriousness of an intelligent child. “Black March”
is a late poem, first published posthumously in Scorpion and Other Poems (1972), in a mode of mock-Imagism:

“Black
March I call him
Because of his eyes
Being like March raindrops
On black twigs.”

Smith
would die in March, on the seventh, in 1971, at age sixty-eight.

Saturday, February 28, 2015

A
self-critical friend passes along a poem by a well-known poet that he finds “as
opaque as a brick wall,” and wonders if I can turn opacity into transparence. My
friend is a smart, well-read fellow, and it’s probably unnecessary to note that
the poem in question is written in one of two dominant contemporary modes of
verse: in this case, pretentious gibberish, with many lacunae and no
continuity, rather than Dick-and-Jane sincerity. It’s less a poem (arguably, it’s
not a poem at all) than a poetic gesture, intended by its author as a sign of
club membership, like a secret handshake among poets. The implication is, if
you don’t get it, you don’t belong. The stuff is easy to write,
attested to by the writer’s bloated corpus, and impossible to read. Dr. Johnson
had the final word on this species of fraud: “What is written without effort is
in general read without pleasure.” On this date, Feb. 28, in 1790, William Cowper writes to his cousin, John Johnson, an aspiring poet:

“Only
remember, that in writing, perspicuity is always more than half the battle: the
want of it is the ruin of more than half the poetry that is published. A
meaning that does not stare you in the face is as bad as no meaning, because
nobody will take the pains to poke for it.”

Except graduate students. Perspicuity
is a fine word and a fine quality in writing. As Sir Thomas Browne puts it in “Of Crystal” in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646-72): “Continuity of parts is the cause of
perspicuity.” That leaves out Emerson and most of his descendants.

Friday, February 27, 2015

A
reader who can also read my musical tastes brightened a dark afternoon with a choice
selection from the Collected Works of
Thomas “Fats” Waller: “That’s Ain’t Right” from Stormy Weather (1943). Waller is one of those rare artists—Louis Armstrong,
P.G. Wodehouse and Fred Astaire are others—who dispense joy without
compromising their art. They give pleasure without shame. They revel in their
job – entertaining us. Philip Larkin said Waller “was in the laughter business
as much as the jazz business,” and we love him for it. Larkin quotes Armstrong “Every
time someone mentions Fats Waller's name, why, you can see grins on all the
faces.” That’s what you would have seen in my office Thursday afternoon.

In
his first collection, No Continuing City
(1969), the Irish poet Michael Longley included a suite of poems with a title adapted
from Yeats, “Words for Jazz Perhaps”: “Elegy
for Fats Waller,” “Bud Freeman in Belfast,” “To Bessie Smith” and “To Bix
Beiderbecke.” The sequence is dedicated to Solly Lipsitz, the late trumpet
player, music critic and record shop owner in Belfast. Here’s Longley’s Waller
poem:

“Lighting
up, lest all our hearts should break,

His
fiftieth cigarette of the day,

Happy
with so many notes at his beck

And
call, he sits there taking it away,

The
maker of immaculate slapstick.

“With
music and with such precise rampage

Across
the deserts of the blues a trail

He
blazes, towards the one true mirage,

Enormous
on a nimble-footed camel

And
almost refusing to be his age.

“He
plays for hours on end and though there be

Oases
one part water, two parts gin,

He
tumbles past to reign, wise and thirsty,

At
the still centre of his loud dominion—

THE
SHOOK THE SHAKE THE SHEIK OF ARABY.”

It’s
not a great poem but it captures and celebrates Waller’s spirit. Jazz has
inspired thousands of poems, most of them not worth reading to the final line.
Like poetry, jazz attracts camp followers for whom the music is the password to
the Hipster Room, where the Cool People live. Longley does something else. He
honors Waller by adopting his tone of good humor tempered with brains. In a brief essay he wrote for The Guardian
in 2011, Longley writes: “Fats must be one of the most musical human beings
ever to have lived. I sense a dark, unsettling challenge behind the twinkle.
Seamlessly he combines sunniness and subversion, and can be very complicated
indeed.” In the poem, he nicely dubs Waller the “maker of immaculate slapstick,”
a description that might apply with equal justice to Buster Keaton.

In
“Light from Two Windows,” a portrait of Longley painted by Jeffery Morgan, you’ll
find a picture of Keaton hanging on the wall and another of Waller on the book
about Charles Ives in the foreground. Look closely and you’ll see other traces
of Longley’s interests – a picture of Billie Holiday, Robert Fagles’
translation of The Illiad, The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941-1944
by Lucjan Dobroszycki, books about Hokusai and Brancusi. Longley, born in 1939,
includes “Old Poets” (“for AnneStevenson”) in Snow Water (2004):

Thursday, February 26, 2015

And
now for the good clean fun of a parlor game. Terry Teachout answers a list of
bookish questions first addressed to David Brooks by the New York Times Book Review. I’m elbowing my way into the interview
just behind Terry, whose answers sometimes overlap mine:

Neither
question elicits a reflexive answer, partly because “novelist” (like “novel”) is
so elusive a category. Is Swift a novelist? Dr. Johnson? Pushed, I would say
Henry James to the first and “I don’t know” to the second (though, like Terry,
I like the author of A House for Mr.
Biswas).

What are your reading
habits–do you prefer electronic or print? Do you write in your books? Keep them
or give away?

Strictly
print. Only occasionally do I vandalize books. Instead, I insert notes to mark
noteworthy passages. I keep most of the good stuff, especially the books I
might reread or at least consult. The rest I give away or sell.

What’s your favorite
genre to read?

Is
“well-written” a genre? It’s the only one worth paying attention to. “Genre” is
usually a polite way to say crap. Like Terry, I’m a happy rereader of Wodehouse and
Stark.

What’s your favorite
book about the newspaper business?

Again,
I like Terry’s choice, but let me add The
Press, A.J. Liebling’s collected press criticism. And let me qualify that by
noting it’s probably the Liebling title I read least often. When I do, it’s for
lines like this: “Inconsiderate to the last, Josef Stalin, a man who never had
to meet a deadline, had the bad taste to die in installments.”

What do you consider to
be the best book about American politics ever written?

Witness (1952) by Whittaker
Chambers.

And what’s your favorite
book by a political columnist?

I
don’t have one.

What kind of reader were
you as a child? Your favorite book? Most beloved character?

Greedy.
I favored field guides and biographies. A little later, Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Among his characters, David Innes and Abner Perry.

If
you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?

The Geography of the
Imagination
(North Point Press, 1981) by Guy Davenport.

If you could meet any
author, dead or living, who would be it be, and why?

Dr.
Johnson. The only other writer I can think of whose life and work vie for
dominance in formulating my esteem would be Charles Lamb. I love Proust but I doubt
we would have much to say to each other (though his English, fortunately, was
better than my French).

You’re hosting a
literary dinner party. Which three writers are invited?

Johnson,
Lamb, Italo Svevo. The last because he was a great writer, mordantly funny, had
learned English from James Joyce and knew something about the real world (business,
marriage, children).

Disappointing,
overrated, just not good: what book did you feel as if you were supposed to
like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

I’ve
never felt that I was “supposed to like” any book. All of them are available OTC, no
prescription required. About the time I reached draft age, I started permitting
myself the luxury of not finishing lousy books, except when I was being paid to
do so. Their number probably exceeds those I’ve read all the way through, which only makes sense. The mediocre in any art form always exceeds the excellent or even
the passably good.

What’s the one book you
wish someone else would write?

A
fat, sympathetic biography of Yvor Winters.

Who would you want to
write your life story?

I’m
laughing.

What books are you
embarrassed not to have read yet?

Murasaki
Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji.

What do you plan to read
next?

Joseph
Epstein’s Masters of the Games: Essays
and Stories on Sport (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). And I know nothing about
sports.

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

My
middle son, a boarding school ninth-grader in Ontario, recently flew home for a
long weekend. It was an almost-last-minute decision, and thus doubly
pleasurable because hardly anticipated. When I reflect on those four days, the moment
I recall with greatest pleasure is when the four of us were seated around the kitchen
table putting together a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of the state of Texas. When
they were young, the boys and I spent hours – days, in the aggregate –
assembling puzzles. I can flatter myself and attribute their gifts for patience
and pattern recognition to those puzzle-making sessions, but in fact they were
merely an excuse for togetherness and teamwork, the satisfaction of a project completed
collaboratively – and competitively. Of course, we had to watch Laurel and
Hardy’s 1933 puzzle-building epic, Me and My Pal. At the start of my son’s visit, could I have anticipated the fond
memory something so mundane as making a jigsaw puzzle would give me? Of course
not.

The
passage quoted at the top is the first sentence of Dr. Johnson’s Idler essay #58, published May 26, 1759.
The second is “Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by
unexpected sparks.” Vast, multi-billion-dollar industries are built on the assumption
that pleasure can be packaged, planned for and purchased, like an insurance
policy against dullness and care, and Johnson will have none of it: “Nothing is
more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.” Pleasure – I like “gladness,” which handily
rhymes with “sadness” – takes us by surprise. In the Rev. James V. Schall’s “On Merriment,” his gloss on Johnson’s essay at the University Bookman, the Jesuit writes:

“We
must set out to do what causes joy, namely, what is right, what is true. We
even pursue our vices for the good that is in them, distorted as it may be. Joy
is a result, not a direct object, of right choice. It is true that we all
prefer to be joyful rather than sad. But it is most likely that, if we set out
to be joyful and not rightly to do the work at hand, we will end up sad.”

Who
is grimmer than a Las Vegas-bound fun-seeker, face fixed in a hideous rictus of
dedicated fun? I’m not knocking slot machines and cocktails. I just wonder about
those who pursue such a formula “end up sad.” The notion that pleasure, and the
even more elusive quality of happiness, are by-products or side effects of
right living, of doing the next right thing, however fumblingly, seems
counter-intuitive almost to madness. Johnson suggests we adopt an attitude of
suspended anticipation. He says of his hypothetical traveler, “the best is always
worse than he expected.” Schall describes as “truly remarkable” Johnson’s
conclusion, a reformulation of a lifelong theme: “…it is necessary to hope,
though hope should always be deluded; for hope itself is happiness, and its
frustrations, however frequent, are less dreadful than its extinction.” It
reminds me of a conversation reported by Boswell in the Life that amounts to the most concise condemnation I know of communism:

“His
Lordship mentioned a charitable establishment in Wales, where people are
maintained, and supplied with every thing, upon the condition of their
contributing the weekly produce of their labour; and he said, they grow quite
torpid for want of property. Johnson: `They have no object for hope. Their
condition cannot be better. It is rowing without a port.’”